every day is a good day
What name do I give this chick? One of Hazel’s chicks has a woodpecker face. It has a featherless neck like Hazel, a Turken chicken. These naked neck Turkens are from Transylvania. This little chick’s biological mother is Special, Hazel’s daughter. Special is a cross between Hazel and Sven, a Swedish Flower Chicken.
Ungetsu-hime 雲月姫 brought her chicks out of the woods today. Like many a parent, she’s too proud of them to squirrel them away in the woods. It’s like she’s flaunting them. This one will be a doctor, this one a lawyer, this one a …
I will be curious where she takes them tonight to bed down. Will she take them back into the woods or find a spot in the chicken yard? There are already three hens with chicks bedding in adjoining nests in one quiet corner of the chicken coop. Somehow they manage to keep their chicks apart. When two hens with clutches get too close and their clutches intermingle, it’s like watching soccer moms trying to corral their tots. Chaos. It’s best to go inside and have a beer or a glass of wine. The mother hens get it all sorted out in the end. There’s no point getting my nerves frayed. Mother hens know best.
Yesterday Hazel took her chicks out for the first time. Out and about she took them. Down the path and through the mint and bachelor buttons, to all the places beautiful she took them. This is why chicks need a mother, someone to show them the beautiful places.
Can you find Hazel’s face in the last picture?
I was heading out the gate on my bicycle to pedal down to the post office when I heard baby chicks chirping in the woods. When I went to check if they were in trouble, I found Ungetsu-hime with a brood of one or two day old chicks. I didn’t even know she was sitting on eggs. What a surprise.
And this is the nest where she hatched her six chicks, a fairy tale nest inside a tree stump with a thick roof of moss and dried ferns. You can see three unhatched eggs near the bottom in the middle of the picture. Below is a closeup of the nest. How many chicks get to be hatched in the woods? These chicks could be the first generation of the wild forest chickens of Bow Hill. If some decades from now you read in Nature or National Geographic about the elusive, mysterious Bow Hill forest fowl, you will know that Ungetsu-hime is the mother of them all.
Beans start out as babies too, cute, tiny, slightly fuzzy, green babies. You know how when you look at someone’s baby picture, you can see similarities between their adult faces and their baby faces? It’s probably the same between baby beans and adult beans. Once the bean pods are fully grown, they probably have uncanny resemblances to their baby bean pods.
What about the order of beans in a pod? Are the first beans controlling, the second beans rebellious, and the last beans fun-loving? Has any scientist studied the characteristics of beans based on their order in a pod?
The bean pods below are way past their baby stage. These are the pods of the Shiro-hana Mame 白花豆 or White Flower Bean. They are so large, three to five beans make a meal.
